Maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle is becoming increasingly important to people and engaging in a regular fitness routine may be part of that lifestyle. In some situations, these fitness routines may include high-impact training such as CrossFit or Olympic lifting where dropping weights on the floor is common. Weights dropped during these high-impact activities may rebound from the floor increasing the risk of injury to nearby persons and the risk of damage to surrounding structures and equipment. These high-impact activities may also generate significant vibrations, some of which may be audible as noise. These vibrations may propagate into and through surrounding structures creating undesirable noise and vibration pollution for nearby persons. Undesirable rebound and noise may also be generated by other high-impact activities unrelated to fitness, such as by moving equipment, by impacts from heavy objects or simply by high-traffic environments. Consequently, mitigating the rebound of objects and the noise they generate may be particularly desirable for locations where these high-impact activities take place, especially when these high-impact activities take place in gyms or other fitness, sports or training facilities located in buildings with other tenants.
Conventional noise mitigating mats and the like are often unsuitable for use with high-impact activities. For example, they may break down under the significant forces generated by the repetitive impacts, or insufficiently reduce rebound and vibrations. A durable and adaptable impact damping mat, equipment accessory and flooring system suitable for high-impact activities is desired.
It is therefore an object at least to provide a novel impact damping mat, a novel equipment accessory and a novel flooring system.